Posted on 06/29/2004 10:55:24 PM PDT by kattracks
Have you checked your child's summer reading list? Beware: Some lame-brained school officials have decided to ditch the sonnets of Shakespeare for the tripe of Tupac.
That's slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur -- the drug-dealing, baseball bat-wielding, cop-hating, Black Panthers-worshiping, convicted sexual abuser who made a fortune extolling the "thug life" before he was gunned down in Las Vegas eight years ago.Teachers in Worcester, Mass., have embraced Shakur's posthumously published book of poems as a way to get middle school students' attention. "We wanted to include books that kids would want to read," Michael O'Sullivan, a member of the summer reading list selection committee, explained to the Telegram and Gazette of Worcester last month before school let out. ''Reading counterculture in schools, and to get kids to read anything that is not completely objectionable, is the goal,'' Deputy Superintendent Stephen E. Mills echoed.
Frances Arena, manager of curriculum and professional development of the Worcester Public Schools, told me this week that Shakur's book will remain on the list for the foreseeable future because it "heightens awareness of character education" and, more importantly, because it's "popular with the kids."
If that's the standard, why not just drop the pretense of academic instruction and assign them comic books and romance novels?
A school board member in Palm Beach County, Fla., is also championing Shakur's so-called literary work. Debra Robinson lobbied to bring Shakur's book into the classroom last month because "I always think we need to capture the children's attention where they are and bring them to where they need to be."
The presumption that children -- and particularly inner-city children -- can only be stimulated by the contemporary and familiar smacks of lazy elitism and latent racism. These educators, and I use that term as loosely as gangster rappers wear their pants, are clearly more interested in appearing cool than in inculcating a refined literary sense in students. Their aim is not enlightenment but dumbed-down ghetto entertainment. So that teachers and pupils can "relate" and be "down with that." So they can "keep it real." You know what I'm sayin'?
The schoolhouse rap peddlers disingenuously argue that Shakur's puerile scribblings serve as useful tools to engage children in reading. Reading? Deciphering is more like it. Shakur's volume, ''The Rose That Grew From Concrete," looks more like a collection of cell phone text messages, teenage hieroglyphics and Backstreet Boys album titles than a collection of poems.
One poem is "Dedicated 2 Me." Another is "Dedicated 2 My Heart." There's one "4 Nelson Mandela" and another "2 Marilyn Monroe," which laments: "They could never understand what u set out 2 do instead they chose 2 ridicule u." Another Shakur opus is titled "When Ure Hero Falls." Still another muses: "What Is It That I (insert pictograph of an eyeball) Search 4."
A dictionary, perhaps?
In riveting prose that presumably rivals Frost or Longfellow, Shakur brags that he is "more than u can handle" and "hotter than the wax from a candle." Edgar Allan Poe had Annabel Lee. Shakur had Renee ("u were the one 2 reach into my heart"), April ("I want 2 c u"), Elizabeth ("the seas of our friendship R calm"), Michelle ("u and I have perfect hearts"), Carmen ("I wanted u more than I wanted me"), Marquita ("u were pure woman 2 me"), Irene ("I knew from the First glance that u would be hard 2 4get"), and Jada.
Proclaiming his love "4 Jada," Shakur pays gallant literary tribute to the object of his desire: "u bring me 2 climax without sex."
Lord Byron, he wasn't.
In an introduction to the dead rapper's volume, Shakur's manager, Leila Steinberg, suggests that her hero has been unjustly denied his "place as a literary artist/poet" because of the "media's sometimes negative portrayal" of him. May I politely suggest that he has been denied a place among the world's greatest poets because his writing is no better than a four-letter word that rhymes with "rap"?
The Western literary canon has been flushed down the cultural toilet in favor of shallow ramblings by celebrity thugs whose thoughts are best left on bathroom walls.
As 2Pac might have responded: 3 Cheers 4 Diversity.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Tupac be caput
"his writing is no better than a four-letter word that rhymes with "rap"?"
LOL!
Well this may be the only time I am on this site but I did have to express my views on this article. I honestly think she missed the entire point. When you read in school it isn't completely about the material. So sleeping with you mother, sleeping with animals and homosexuality is an okay thing to read about in school? In school I remember reading about kids having affairs with their mothers, homosexuality in mythology as well as in Shakespeare. People being stoned in a Lottery. When we read these pieces it was about the scenery, motifs, and how it was written and also why it was written. I honestly think that 2Pac can inspire young people to talk and actually read and comprehend what they are reading. Inspire a thought process instead of being spoon fed the same information.
The only problem with this is that kids "reading" this crap are not really reading. Somehow, somewhere teachers got some wild-eyed notion that kids should be taught about the real world in school. No, kids need to be taught how to read, write and count numbers in school. The real world will be there for them when they are done with the education.
The dumbing down of America is what this is all about. If kids get the idea that something like this is considered "good" then there is a lesser incentive to learn. I had this argument with my evil, blood-sucking liberal mother-in-law when she argued that I shouldn't punish the kids for ill behavior because, in her words, "Oh, you did the same thing when you were that age." The job of any parent and teacher requires a certain amount of hypocrisy. Otherwise known as "learning from one's mistakes. You learn from personal experience that you should or should not do something and you use that experience to educate your children. Even though we may trip and stumble through life, we know what is right and wrong. If we stop trying to teach what is right and wrong, both morally and institutionally, then there is no future.
Teach kids classic culture with a heavy dose of Latin and then let them go and write all the crap they want. Chances are that if they are taught the classics they would, in most cases, ignore 2PAC and all the other wino thugs hanging out on the corner with their brown bags complaining about "the man holdin' us back".
Of course, this is just my correct humble opinion.
Does Ms. Malkin freep, do you know?
Why not teach the kids the comedies? Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream? There's still good material to chew on there, but it's a little more obvious.
My daughter (16) watched Kurosawa's Ran with us, and then read Lear. To the extent that a young person with her life before her can "get it," I think she does. Even though young people can't fully appreciate the perspective that 60 years or so gives, it starts them thinking, and they can always come back to it later.
I believe she is at the least a lurker. She knows who we are ;)
Thanks for the Pabbis info stay.
Yeah, inspire them to talk like buffons. You just admitted to being an idiot.
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